[OpenIndiana-discuss] "OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns"

[Sašo Kiselkov]

On 08/31/2012 09:22 PM, Ron Dawson wrote:
> In my workplace we are still using some SPARC desktop applications on aging
> Sun SPARC workstations and Tadpole laptops.  We also utilize Sun Ray
> technology extensively in our training environment.  (As an aside, I
> remember talking to Garrett back when he was working for Tadpole/General
> Dynamics about specing out a Tadpole purchase for our portable Sun Ray
> training classroom).  Our production servers are all running Solaris 10
> (SPARC) and there are a couple of Solaris 11 (x86) servers I'm looking to
> bring online soon.  I was hoping to complete our migration of our desktop
> apps to OI running on x86 for out in the field, but I suppose we could just
> continue on that road to a Linux desktop if we have to.  In theory we could
> run our Sun Ray clients on a Linux server although I have not tried setting
> that up.  I'm not sure how much help Oracle would be willing to provide if
> we were not running Oracle Linux.  I would prefer to remain in the
> Solaris/Illumos/OI world though.

I think you hit one area where, as garrett described, Illumos and OI
could excel: desktop virtualization. It's all the rage these days due to
reduced management issues and added security. Sun had a solution for
just this market ages ago with the Sun Ray range of products. OI should
take a good long look at these areas, because we could use the core
Illumos technologies to really kick commercial VDI infrastructures in
the teeth with at least the following:

 *) Much, much, much lower overhead when compared to VDI. A VDI machine
    needs loads of DRAM, loads of disk IO capacity and consequently is a
    very expensive proposition. OI can run VDI instances either
    natively or isolated in zones and provide excellent performance
    (potentially orders of magnitude better than VMware or other kinds
    of traditional heavy-weight VMs).

 *) ZFS for file management, built-in backups, rollbacks, and just a
    sweet bundle of win for the VDI market.

 *) A very secure and well managed software environment with local
    IPS repos, DTrace for solving performance issues and just generally
    much better control over the environment than that provided by
    closed black-box products).

Anyway, just my $0.02

Cheers,
--
Saso